SFF community cleanup room

5:50 PM

@Gallifreyan not yet, I need to work out my position on the official SE-policy.

Basically, I think bad posts — perhaps given in good faith be a new user, but bad nonetheless — should be deleted instead of down voted.

b_jonas

what's this?

@b_jonas This is room Mith opened because he didn't want to pollute the main chat with links to bad answers and spam posts.

We also have a feed of spam answers named @SmokeDetector here.

6:32 PM

@SQB The thing is, the (more-or-less) network-wide policy is not to do delete them if they are merely bad, but still answer the question. I hope you're following that policy.

@Adamant In our case I think the problem is the definition of "answers the question". Some things I've got flags rejected on contained enough information or babble to look like answers, but did not answer the question.

And I don't see anything wrong in deleting blatantly throwaway answers, such as those answers that said "Jedi" is a Biblical reference, but didn't provide any evidence.

If we won't lose any valuable information - wipe. Bad answers only provoke more bad answers.

And if a user had posted an unsourced throwaway answer and came back to update it but found it deleted, they will have no trouble writing another answer or undeleting the first one.

Mind you, I'm not saying all unsourced answers should get burned or anything. One- or two-line answers, on the other hand...

6:57 PM

@Gallifreyan Uh-uh. Those are should definitely be kept. The rules are clear. If we want to create a sourcing requirement, like Skeptics, that requires consensus.

@Adamant That's the plan.

@Adamant Actually, I'm pretty sure that that is exactly why 20kers can VTD answers - they're supposed to community-delete wrong answers. They're not for mods to delete, but yes for the 20kers to delete.

Q: What is the origin of the name "Jedi"?

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Where does the name "Jedi" originate, either in or out of universe? Is there any in-universe evidence at all for the origin of the word? Out of universe, how did George Lucas come up with the name "Jedi" - is it based on any real-life word or was it entirely invented?

^ The three answers here are definitely not the kind of answers we want to encourage, and given the amount of downvotes they're definitely not to community's liking.

Yes. So 3 people with 20k rep can vote to delete those.

(I need another 8k rep - should get back to answering bad HP question.)

Any answers that need downvotes?

A: Why shouldn't I delete wrong answers?

7:15 PM

@Mithrandir No, no, nooo.

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There are different kinds of wrong. "Wrong" as in "completely unrelated to the question"? Go ahead and delete those. "Wrong" as in "yes, that will solve the problem, but that's a bad idea"? Those should be downvoted. Think of it as a lesson - showing a bad solution can be helpful as well, espe...

@Adamant I think that there are opposing views on Meta, by staff...

@Mithrandir Some users may have said such things, but the message from the SE developers and team has always been clear.

A: What is the origin of the name "Jedi"?

I don't think so....

here we go, from the privilege page:

> You may vote to delete answers in the following cases:

The answer is extremely low quality: There is little to no scope for improvement

So, like this:

-11

JEDI = JEsus' DIsciple; it's a biblical connection.

Looks like fair game.

A: Remove "formatting" from Very Low Quality flag description

@Mithrandir Indeed, but people have often misinterpreted what that means. It doesn’t mean “I think this answer is bad.” It means this:

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Your emphasis changes the meaning of the flag. The purpose is to indicate that the issues - whether with formatting or content - are severe, and cannot be salvaged. That's right: the key part of that flag's description is, unlikely to be salvageable. Anders' answer is correct. Indeed, we could ...

Note what Shog thinks it means:

This [question|answer] is impossible to read or understand. It is unlikely to be salvageable through editing, and might need to be removed.

That's for flagging.

7:22 PM

Sadly, the answer you posted is extremely easy to understand, albeit tremendously silly.

@Mithrandir What, you don’t think “extremely low quality” means the same thing as “very low quality”?

There's a difference between flagging and directly voting to delete.

We can raise it on Science Fiction & Fantasy Meta if you want :)

@Mithrandir There’s no need to do so, because the PTB have made their opinions clear.

Apparently not, as we still differ on opinion...

@Adamant I don't see why we should care about their opinion given that 1) it's ambiguous (since we're discussing it) and 2) they don't know how our site works and what we think makes a good or bad or very bad answer.

@Gallifreyan With regard to why we should care about the opinion of the CMs, I can think of at least one recent reason, though it’s only visible to users with 10k+ in chat. ;)

They do make the rules (mostly), and these are some pretty basic rules.

The idea that bad answers have value and should not be deleted is a pretty old one, and fairly central to SE.

Like the idea that duplicates have value, and shouldn’t be deleted.

7:29 PM

@Adamant Fine. I don't see at all how "Jesus' Disciple" = "Jedi". I don't see any similarities between the two sects. I leave a comment under the answer "saying I don't get" it. Now let's look at the very low quality queue standart comment: "leave answers that do not require clarification from the asker" (or some such). I required clarification; answerer left; we have 3 worthless answers on our hands.

Duplicate questions aid searchability and I have no problem with that. Crap answers don't aid anything.

@Gallifreyan I think the issue is that you just think it’s wrong. Of course Jedi doesn’t come from “Jesus’s Disciple.” But would you delete a one-line answer that said that “Remus Lupin” = founder of Rome raised by wolves. It’s a classical connection.”

I wouldn’t. It would be brief, but entirely correct.

This answer is just wrong. Not hard to understand, but wrong.

Look, there are more delete votes on this:

“Maybe Jedi came from a shortened or plural form of Jedediah, which is the name given to Solomon by God at his birth. Solomon is arguably the wisest author in the bible. As in Star Wars, the Jedi must be wise in their ways in the battle between good and evil.”

The reasoning is laid out more clearly there, and is also just as incorrect, but people thought it more worthy of deletion. Because deletion (and probably VLQ flags, though I can’t see them) were being used as a proxy for disagreement.

@Adamant That one is fixable with some links and maybe a brief text from Wikipedia. I've previously fixed both too short and wrong story-ID answers with links and cover arts and even read the short story to add description for one, but this one is wrong.

@Gallifreyan The only reason it’s fixable, by your standard, though, is that it’s correct. If it were wrong, there wouldn’t be a Wikipedia text or links.

Q: When should 20kers vote to delete an answer?

0

After a discussion with @Adamant in chat today, I realized that we're not very clear on exactly when to vote te delete an answer (or at least I'm not clear). The privilege page for 20k gives these guidelines for voting to delete an answer: You may vote to delete answers in the following case...

discussion answers vote-to-delete

@Adamant That's exactly my point. Some wrong answers are just too wrong to live.

7:38 PM

@Gallifreyan Well, that’s not what the system was designed for.

If we were supposed to delete the answers that we considered most wrong, I suspect that would be in the deletion guidelines more explicitly. I suspect there wouldn’t be a bunch of posts from Shog saying not to delete wrong answers.

@Adamant SFF is not what the system was designed for. Maybe the policy works on SO or SU, where answers can be wrong and useful, but it's not the case with those three.

@Gallifreyan Wellll, arguing that SFF should be exempt from the rules that govern the other sites is probably an argument for main meta. But I don’t know that it would be a popular one.

I don't see why we should take it to the main meta. If the community here decides that some answers need to be removed even though they answer the question, it's enough.

@Gallifreyan It certainly is. I just think it’s not a great idea (and unnecessary) to apply a very different standard, that of deleting answers for being wrong, than the PTB think is the healthy one.

A: Let's get aligned on how spam flags can be used

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I vote the following: Red flags on gibberish are okay (handle as Helpful). Do we really want "sdfiushrf;usrgbsrilbslfibsl.eifub!" sticking around the site for longer than necessary? Red flags put the ability to remove these posts in the hands of a much wider scope of the community than communit...

7:45 PM

@Mithrandir yup, were I over 20k, I'd vote to delete.

@Mithrandir I don’t really disagree with this…though it’s still best to use spam flags for spam, if only to have the distinction straight in one’s mind.

But this doesn’t relate to the question at hand.

...part of that discussion was red flags on gibberish. Conclusion: R/A is preferable over VLQ for removing it very quickly.

It’s all about spam (unsolicited advertising), abusive stuff (should be self-explanatory), and gibberish (doesn’t make any sense).

I think "spam flag" should be the name of the flag used for spam, rude or abusive materials, and gibberish.

@Mithrandir That answer is not by any means gibberish.

7:47 PM

@Adamant And I didn't say it was.

The example given was sdfiushrf;usrgbsrilbslfibsl.eifub!

I am not recommending flagging that JEDI answer at all.

I am saying that it can be community deleted via 20ker votes.

@Mithrandir I remain perplexed that you would want to delete something that you do not consider flag-worthy.

@Adamant 'does not require moderator intervention' is not the same as 'deserves not to be deleted'.

I would quote from the mod help, but that's kinda illegal... :P

@Mithrandir Only one sort of flag exclusively requires moderator attention. The rest kick it into the VLQ queue for deletion.

7:50 PM

@Adamant But they all end up in the mod queue.

> flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies or an altogether wrong answer

@Mithrandir Yeah.

> flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention

Also, the answers being so closely related and one user (in the deleted post) seeming to respond to... something, makes me wonder if a mod should check the origin of those "answers".

^^which does not apply to something that the community should take care of - e.i, mods should decline custom flags asking to close something (yes, there's a canned decline reason for that).

@Mithrandir Granted. But I’m not talking about alerting moderators. As you know, most of these flags go through community review.

7:53 PM

Yes, I do. But when you talk about flags, they do go through the mod queue. That's why I'm saying not to flag them, but yes to delete them.

I still am not sure why you’d (a) want to delete things that CMs have said should not be flagged, and at least implied should not be deleted, and (b) are no worse in quality that equivalent correct answers.

The whole point of many discussions is that we should not be using deletion as a proxy for disagreement with an answer’s veracity. We have downvotes for that.

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I gave my reasoning in the meta post.